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Mozilla Adds MNG Support
HoserHead writes: "For those who are really worried about the Unisys patent on LZW compression in GIF files, the answer may soon be at hand: MNG is on the way. PNG has a brother in MNG, which is the free alternative to animated GIFs. Tim Rowley has recently sent Mozilla hackers a checkin of preliminary MNG support, as can be read here (Necko/Imglib section). Now, all that's needed is MNG export support for the GIMP!"
If you're using Windows, MSIE has an option to disable animations. I haven't tried it though.
Tools->Internet Options->Advanced->Multimedia->Play Animations
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
She's threatened other people with lawsuits, and hasn't been able to follow through because not only does she not have a leg to stand on, but the music she uses belongs to Disney, so she's violating a much more strongly-defended copyright.
I highly recommend the above link, BTW. Kill them hamsters.
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Netscape products have always offered hitting 'STOP' twice after the page loads (since 4.x?) to stop Animated gifs ...
... I like a lot of the animated GIFs out there ... the nice clean ones that look like well-done marketing logos.
... PS, yes
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The fact is, it made sense to use Jpeg at the time (there were few if any decent, widespread alternatives that had similar "compressability") and CompuServe (which, for all of you net.neophytes was a huge ISP back in the day) threw its weight behind GIF. Sure, better formats have popped up since, but who uses 'em? I don't, /. certainly doesn't, neither does Yahoo!.
The fact is, if you want to know when an image format is finally on the verge of gaining acceptance, check out the porn world... Porn sites can also tell you when efficient movie formats are mainstream "enough." Virtually the intire PC industry is goverened by either games or porn... It's no surprise that it's dominated by men.Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
If you are thinking about killing animation check out bug 21623.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.
I think that after Mozilla comes out of beta, then sites will start moving to PNG quickly. As a web developer I still see a fair percentage of visitors with Netscape less than 4.5, which doesn't support PNG (*so far as I know... let me know if I'm wrong*)
We'll see a large-scale displacement of GIFs on my sites within a year, once the percentage of PNG incapable browsers on our sites drops below 10%. Don't hate me, but I subscribe to the theory that if you are a holdout against new technology you gotta roll with the punches and accept it (of course, text alternative menus are a must). MNG will be the same, if it's as good as they say. Like any new technology, if Microsoft and AOL/Netscape support it "out of the box" I'll be moving over again.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
...like supporting JNG encoding (JPEG done PNG style), which I'm sure people will love for porn banner ads.
I thought the same thing, though. I actually went so far as to design my own spec, which I called IMAG8 (Interim Minimal Animated Graphic - 8-bit; basically, a pixel dump of the sprites, and a list of simple frame compositions, all zlib compressed). I believe that the GIF licence will run out before MNG gets widespread support (because it's so complicated), but I thought if I designed a sufficiently simple format, it could replace GIF overnight for many uses (such as banner ads in custom programs used for one specific service, like specialized versions of ICQ).
I dropped the idea before I released it, though. It worked out okay technically (only a few hundred lines of code for the viewer; it's not that hard when you stick to the rule "implement, then document"), but I decided that I didn't really want to support the use of animated banner ads.
When you get right down to it, I don't think there's a valid use for that kind of functionality. It's just another way to grab the user's attention to something he'd rather ignore. It ought to be turned off by default in all web browsers.
But [you] can count the number of sites that actually use [PNG images] on one hand, can't you?
For a set to be counted on one standard human hand, there must be thirty-one or fewer elements (all five fingers up = binary 11111 = 31). Here's a short list; can you think of more?
- Pinocchio's Brother and redpinocchio (my homepage)
- Every other site I've designed (can't name them; confidentiality)
- PNG headquarters
- League for Programming Freedom
- Burn All GIFs Day
- Campaign for Real Ale
- AuctionBeagle
- University of Puerto Ricto Institute of Neurobiology
- Eressea Fantasy PBEM
- several clip art sites (here or here)
To find more, do a web search for burn all gifs.Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem with the STOP button in Navigator is that they've slipped a SHOP button in right beside it. Generally I only use the STOP button in emergency situations, i.e. I accidently click on a link, on a page that took forever to load, and don't want to go through loading it again to undo my mistake. (i.e. slow loading dynamic pages). So I hit the SHOP button by mistake (I of course have the graphics turned off on the buttons), and whoosh. It sucks. It sucks a LOT.
www.britz.com - somehow down atm - uses animated gifs in its online booking system tutorial to show requirements and so on.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Clue: read a magazine. I see no JPGs and GIFs.
Yes. I know you're a troll.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I do love using the transparent Gif and will continue using them. PNG is cool too.
PNG supports both GIF-style binary and alpha-blended transparency. If you care about browser support, IE 4.02 and later support binary transparency in indexed images, and Mozilla supports full alpha transparency (falling back to dithered alpha on platforms such as X without alpha channels).
Will I retire or break 10K?
And yet this is not a troll/flame. *sigh*
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
After reading through this whole list of discusion there were only a handful of people who sounded like they even had any idea what they were talking about. That is my only guess as to why this topic was so spammed.
Okay so MNG isn't widely supported yet, that problem is fixed one application at a time isn't it? I've actually been using it for quite some time and think highly of the format.
PNG isn't widely supported yet? Not as widely supported as GIF or JPEG but I'm seeing it more and more often. Maybe it is more popular among the geek crowd than among graphic artist but it's starting to spread across the web and is supported in most graphic manipulation and viewing programs I've seen.
Internet Explorer, Photoshop, whatever can't use it.. I refer you back to answer #1. Support comes one app at a time. If you want your favorite app to support it too then tell them so.
Mozilla should be working on other things? Mozilla is an open project and people can contribute whatever they are interested in to the cause. MNG is a highly requested feature. If you want something else worked on then either do it yourself or fund someone else to do it.
PNG/MNG aren't good enough? Again if you don't like the way things are then improve upon it, fund someone else to improve upon it, or convince the patent holder of your favorite standard to make it free. Or just go on paying stupid fees if you want.
Mozilla has a dumb logo? What the shit does that have to do with MNG in Mozilla? Make a skin for it that has whatever logo you like.
Your favorite porn site doesn't use PNG/MNG so it must not be a real image format? Maybe they're to busy masturbating over their own models to think about saving their images in a better format. Get a life and get laid and stop wanking to porn sites.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid
Well it is supported by Paint Shop Pro, which is really the graphic editor of most people who do web pages and can't afford Photoshop (or don't want to bother with the complexity of it). So it is already well supported on the creation side... now what is needed is support in IE. No support in IE = death.
Sure, all that's needed for it to take off is support in Mozilla and the GIMP! Then it'll be the huge success that PNG has been.... right?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I hoped Unisys' plot to destroy banner ads was going to work...;( K
This may be useful in a niche way, but I don't see it really making inroads on the big boys. Jpeg, jpeg2000, and flash/shockwave are going to be all the multimedia necessary for websites in the present and in the foreseable future. Animated gifs are soo old school that they are almost embarassing, typically are vastly overused and tend to detract from the aesthetics and usability of a site. I have seen very few sites that use animated gifs in a useful or even artistic / cool way, whereas I have seen many that use flash and javascript and standard html in very cool ways that enhance usability (though, of course, the use of flash and other elements of "chrome" does not necessarily make a site better).
I know you're all dying to read it...
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ spec/draft-mng-lc.html
is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder heh.... ah well, the advance of modern technology blah blah.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
I can have my totally free, politically correct dancing hamsters.
The official MNG page is here, and this is a list of applications which do support MNG. As the article mentions, the GIMP is notable by its absence.
This contains some interesting info on the MNG format, and this shows how MNG compares to other image formats.
Since when is Photoshop a MS product? There's a reason it's called Adobe Photoshop.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
The bugzilla report is here.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
You see, a decent viewer can somethings actually correct this type of problem automatically. Considering the ammount of structure in image files, it's actually quite easy to build a reconstructor that will make the image passible.
Given the way the Internet Explorer 5.01 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 can be "modularly" updated using Windows Update, don't be surprised once the final spec for MNG is published Microsoft (or whatever company that handles IE in the future :-) will have an update available to make IE read .MNG files.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
This will kill one of my excuses why I haven't fixed bug 8415. If somebody fixes bug 19283 I'm in trouble ;-)
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I guess I have to admit that every now and then I run across an animated GIF that is actually interesting or amusing...
:-)
But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.
Every day, I wish that my browser had an option to disable animated images. Perhaps there could be a menu icon I could click to enable them on the rare occasion that I really wanted to see the other frames. Now THAT feature would be a major plus to Mozilla. Chances are, I will some day go into the code and add it myself (THANK YOU, MOZILLA for the source code
Honestly, how many of you really enjoy those crappy, animated banner ads on your screen? Is this going to be an *improvement* for Mozilla?
A dingo ate my sig...
Tiff also SUPPORTS the LZW compression that Unisys owns the patent for, however many applications that use TIFF do not, and it's not used all the freaking time, like it is in GIF.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Someone's tagline once said "cutting and pasting from the linked Slashdot article is not Informative... it's Redundant". I agree.
I would rather see some discussion more on-topic, such as why this is good, or bad... not "for your convenience" cut and pasting from obvious links.
I'm glad that people are excited about this format. I hope that in 5 years it becomes a well-used standard. PNG is just starting to catch on in the graphics industry, although it's nowhere near as well supported as say TIFF.
And that's too bad.. you always know PNG video frames are lossless, and they're lots smaller than pure uncompressed stuff.
More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid. This is needed in things like Broadcast 2000, where it might make an impact.
Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.
But Mozilla MNG support's still nice, for small niche websites where you know the audience is capable of viewing it without a Netscape 4 plugin and IE control.
tif[f] is a widely used format. Developed by Aldus (now part of Adobe) and Microsoft. Tiff also contains the LZW compression that Unisys own the patent for...
K
Actually, the signature used in PNG/MNG is a *very* cool hack. By including both the LF and CR ASCII bytes, a properly constructed PNG/MNG decoder can determine whether or not the image file was misconverted as it passed through different computer systems than the one it was created in (ie. the file might have been sent in text mode by accident).